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My internet speed from speed test is:

Download Speed: 19123 kbps (2390.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 4597 kbps (574.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

However, today I feel that sites are taking awfully long time to load. So I decided to ping yahoo to notice the response time. I think it is taking a long time.

PING any-fp.wa1.b.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=8.82 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=9.41 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=9.03 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=10.1 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=5 ttl=55 time=9.00 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=6 ttl=55 time=10.3 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=7 ttl=55 time=11.0 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=8 ttl=55 time=9.67 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=9 ttl=55 time=9.24 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=10 ttl=55 time=9.71 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=11 ttl=55 time=8.96 ms
64 bytes from ir1.fp.vip.re1.yahoo.com (69.147.125.65): icmp_seq=12 ttl=55 time=9.90 ms

Is there a way to find out what could be clogging the connections to the outside world? Or maybe 'start fresh'. What I've done is just disabled and enabled 'Networking'

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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 31 '10 at 20:37

This question came from our site for system administrators and desktop support professionals.

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Those ping times look pretty good. It takes the ping under 10 ms to go from your computer to Yahoo and back again. It may be that whatever DNS server you're using is having problems and it takes a long time to resolve DNS queries, that tends to manifest as "browsing the web is sluggish, but downloading things give a pretty decent throughput".

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I think this almost certainly a bad DNS server. Try switching your DNS to Googl'e or OpenDNS. I usually use both on systems I administer. – Zaki Manian Aug 31 '10 at 16:08
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up vote 0 down vote

First of all, your download speed is mostly related to your bandwidth, and the ping time related to your latency.

Think of a large tube with water flowing through it. If you make the tube wider, more water can flow through it so overall you get more water in the same amount of time, this is bandwidth. Now think of speeding up the water as it flows through the small pipe, you end up getting more water because of the speed increase, but the width (bandwidth) stays the same.

Try performing a traceroute which should tell you the latency to each router in the link.

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Well, speeding up the water would also increase the bandwidth (if "amount of water per time unit" is the bandwidth measure, as your analogy implies). You can either increase the bandwidth (and latency) by increasing the speed in the channel or you can increase the amount of information transferred by having multiple single-bit pipes in parallel (this increases the bandwidth, but not the latency). If you increase the transfer speed, but require active ACKs of data packets before sending the next, it MAY improve latency but certainly not the bandwidth. – Vatine Aug 31 '10 at 15:25
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up vote 0 down vote

Try installing the mtr package. A command like mtr -i 10 google.com will give you a nice interface to visualize where the delays are occuring. It has options for running ping or traceroute scans.

After it has been running for 10 seconds you will start getting information on how stable the times are.

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